In 2005, I installed a stage 3 gentoo on a pentium MMX 233Mhz with 32 or 64Mb of RAM. As I was sleeping at night and at uni during the day, it took me 3 days to install the base system. No GUI.
I'm going to date myself here, but when I was in high school in the late '90s, a friend of mine introduced me to Linux and helped me get it set up. He gave me the distro he used at the time: Debian. He explained to me how Debian, unlike other distros, compiles everything it installs, which is why it takes so long. I recall him explaining that this would make things run better in some way (but I was a teenager and don't remember too clearly). The install took hours. Many hours. I don't remember what kind of computer I had, it was a Pentium something.
There was such a sort of romance and intrigue to Linux back then. It was so challenging to get working, the desktop environments were janky AF, getting some drivers working was like a day's work. I miss it, though.
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